The snow is finally melting on my mountain! I am so happy. The blue jays hanging out at my feeder are beginning their spring mating rituals with the male taking a seed from the feeder, flying to the waiting female and then feeding her it, proving he will be a good daddy for future baby birdies. This sudden surge in warmness is thanks to our local star, the sun. A burst of energy has come from it to us heating up the atmosphere and bringing spring.

A super easy way to tell if the earth will be warmer or colder is to count sun spots and track how strong they are. Lo and behold, we have a perfect example of this today! There is also a large coronal hole to the east of the sunspot that is very active. This sends out a Solar Wind.

The solar wind is not uniform. Although it is always directed away from the Sun, it changes speed and carries with it magnetic clouds, interacting regions where high speed wind catches up with slow speed wind, and composition variations.

The solar wind speed is high (800 km/s) over coronal holes and low (300 km/s) over streamers. These high and low speed streams interact with each other and alternately pass by the Earth as the Sun rotates. These wind speed variations buffet the Earth’s magnetic field and can produce storms in the Earth’s magnetosphere.

We still know little about the coronal hole winds. I hope we gain knowledge about this, it would help us understand the #1 driver of our climate: the sun. Nothing has a bigger effect except for oceans which are the temperature ballast of our ecosystem that holds heat and cools down various events.

The two things that control our climate the most are being ignored by NOAA as they cling to a much more primitive system of forecasting: magical formulas that don’t work.

I am very grateful that our sun has this energy still to warm things up. I was beginning to fall apart due to the severe, long cold with nearly every night below zero. The harsh conditions and ice storms caused many problems.

Yesterday, I took apart my upper garage doors and rebuilt them, for example. It was a balmy 42 degrees and I actually felt hot while working due to acclimating to such severe cold.

My father chose to persuade the government of Chile and US to build a huge telescope complex in the deserts off of the Pacific Ocean due to it being extremely dry. Now, it is not so dry and I thought global warming was supposed to make things drier not wetter. Well, the greening of the planet due to more CO2 and warmer weather is a good thing, no? These mummies are like the Egyptian ones: they came about thanks to the super warm cycle that happened 7,000 years ago.

It was VERY warm back then, much warmer than today. All glacial/interglacial cycles are warmest at the beginning of the meltdown and I believe firmly this is due to the sun being active with lots and lots of sunspots.

A new paper published in Global and Planetary Change finds a link between reconstructed temperatures of the Japan Sea and solar activity over the past 1300 years. The authors also find the strength of the East Asian Monsoon related to solar activity and the phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO).

The paper follows on the heels of another paper published last week finding Indian Summer Monsoon failures “synchronize well with abrupt changes in solar activity,” which may represent another potential solar amplification mechanism by which small changes in solar activity are amplified to large-scale effects on climate.

The Red Queen’s race is an incident that appears in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and involves the Red Queen, a representation of a Queen in chess, and Alice constantly running but remaining in the same spot.
“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”
“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” [1]

In 1859, one of those CMEs made a direct hit on our little planet. They didn’t know about them back then … these blobs ejected by solar flares go off in random directions, meaning they miss Earth 99.99% of the time.

If one like that were to hit today, it would knock out the electric grid, continent-wide.

We KNOW it is possible, since it has happened. Before 1859, it would hardly be noticed, but by that time, there were lengths of wire strung around the landscape. The size of the electrical pulse depends on the length of wire — so a barbed wire fence would produce lightning.

Without the lengths of wire, the pulse just washes by. It’s the electric equivalent of a tsunami. If you are out at sea, a tsunami is just a bigger-than-average wave, and no big deal. Only when that wave breaks on the shore does its size become apparent. And without electrical conductors, you don”t notice the pulse from the CME.

A similar effect, an EMP, can be accomplished with a nuclear weapon detonated outside the atmosphere.

Of course, the flare in Elaine’s picture is just a lousy little M-class flare. To really smack the Earth’s magnetosphere, you need an X-class flare, and it has to eject a huge blob of electrically charged gas, and that blob has to actually come this way instead of flying off in some other direction.

It was probably an exaggeration to say the Sun has ‘awakened’. We have merely gotten better at taking pictures of it. In visible light, it still looks like the plain old yellow Sun, with a few spots on it. These pictures were taken in the far ultraviolet and x-ray part of the spectrum, where the interesting action is.

If you look at the earth wind map, the 250 hPa level shows that the jet stream pattern has moved to the east, and that source branch that used to come straight south from the pole, has shifted to a more westerly direction.

At the 850 hPa level (near the surface), you can see that the big winter storm pattern, with its counterclockwise rotation, has moved from Elaine’s neighborhood over to offshore from Labrador.

Of course these weather patterns wobble around a lot, and there’s no guarantee that Elaine won’t see another blizzard this spring. It’s also possible that spring is here, for the usual reasons. More hours of daylight and the Sun is more directly overhead here in the northern hemisphere.

Some of the worst blizzards like the one in 1888, happen in late March! And we have had big blizzards even in April during the cold cycle of the 1970’s. One came famously on the 15th, income tax day.

We are getting another storm this weekend. Some people will get rain, some ice and some get snow. I am supposed to get the ice part. Ice is very dangerous, it breaks trees down, brings down power lines and causes huge car accidents.